Method & Disclosure 方法
What is ancient here, what a machine made, and what a human chose — kept distinct, on every page.
The source text
Each chapter begins from the received Wang Bi textual tradition of the 道德經 (Tao Te Ching), in traditional characters with modern punctuation. The original is carried unchanged: it is never converted to simplified characters at runtime, never abridged, and never placed behind a language switch. Working reference:道德經 (王弼本) on Wikisource.
What the machine does
A language model produces a first poetic English rendering and a short reflection in Chinese and English. These are machine-generated and human-selected. The machine is not a sinologist, a native speaker, a conscious authority, or a definitive interpreter. Classical Chinese admits many grammatical and philosophical readings; what appears here is one interpretation, not a settled translation.
What the human does
A human editor selects, questions, and answers. In a recorded conversation the rendering or a reflection may be revised, a translation note or a textual-variant note may be added, and passages may be chosen for the eventual book. The human’s closing response follows that conversation.
How revisions are kept
When a rendering or reflection is revised, the first version is preserved beside the revised one — the site never silently overwrites earlier material. Consequential textual variants may be added after specialist review, and are marked as such.
Voices, in the podcast
Two voices, never blurred. Every word the machine wrote — the rendering, the reflection, its side of the conversation — is performed by an approved synthetic voice, one recognizable machine identity across Chinese and English. Every word the human editor wrote or spoke is heard only in his own recorded voice. The editor's voice is never synthesized, cloned, or repaired; where a human recording is missing, that part is marked unrecorded rather than voiced by the machine. Each reading opens and closes with a small meditation bowl. The colophon records which voices are recorded and which are synthetic.
What is not claimed
- The machine is not described as a person or a human author.
- No completion is claimed for chapters that have not opened.
- No conversation, human reflection, podcast episode, review, or date is shown before it genuinely exists.
Production history and model versions are recorded in thecolophon. Who is behind the project is on theabout page.
